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Even young babies know who’s boss

By Ferris Jabr

Video: Babies know who’s boss

In many species, bigger is better. Birds puff their plumage to inflate their perceived size, humans talk about the “big man” on campus, and are even more likely to vote for the tallest candidate in an election. Now, it seems that children as young as 10 months use size as a cue to interpret social hierarchies.

Lotte Thomsen at Harvard University and colleagues showed children between 11 and 16 months a series of videos in which cartoon blocks with an eye and a mouth duel for dominance. The blocks are deliberately abstract so the infants focus only on information that relates to size and conflict.

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In the movies, a large and small block repeatedly bump into one another as they try to cross the same path. Sometimes, the smaller block bows before its larger rival and scoots out of the way; other times, the bigger block concedes to its little challenger. Thomsen measured how long the infants stared at the screens after the battles were resolved.

The infants watched the screen for an average of 20 seconds when a large block submitted to a small block, but only looked for an average of 12 seconds when the big block won the challenge.

Long look

Psychologists agree that the longer an infant gazes at a scene, the more surprising the infant finds it.

Thomsen thinks therefore that even prelingual children understand enough about how social dominance works to know that battles in which “David” beats “Goliath” violate expectations.

“Infants come into the world with certain basic concepts even before they have language – they are prepared to understand physics and causality,” says Thomsen. “What we are suggesting is that a basic understanding of social relationships is also one of the building blocks of the mind.”

The researchers confirmed in further trials that the infants were engaged by the social conflicts in the videos, rather than merely interested in the physics of moving blocks. They also showed that babies acquire the mental maturity to perceive social dominance around 10 months.

“I was quite sceptical at first, because I thought that seemed like a very far-fetched concept for infants,” says Sara Cordes who studies infant cognition at Boston College in New York. “But the data are quite good. Infants seem to be aware of social dominance much earlier than we thought.”

Cordes suggests that mental representations of social dominance emerge alongside enhanced locomotion, once children have begun crawling and practicing more fluid movements. “They may have likened the larger blocks to a parent and the smaller ones to children and you don’t typically get parents bowing out of the way for children,” Cordes says.